The present invention relates to electronic data transfer, and in particular to communication improvements between a mobile device and backend applications.
Personal mobile communication is an important aspect for many people in modern life. A large portion of it is covered by pure voice data for use with mobile phones. The other part relates to electronic data traffic for use with a broad variety of ‘mobile devices’ often referred to as pervasive devices and further abbreviated herein as PDs, e.g., hand-helds, personal digital assistants (PDAs), palm top computer, or mobile phones having extended functions, like e.g. WAP facility.
With increasing acceptance of such ‘quasi-omnipotential’ devices it has become a must for more and more enterprises to offer any kind of information services to their clients which are intended to be performed via such a PD and the respective enterprise. Such solutions are typically implemented in prior art such that a communication takes place between a succinctly programmed application installed on the client's PD and the corresponding counterpart application of a ‘backend’ system of the enterprise. Said backend system is in turn often connected to or comprises an enterprise database or any business solution program dedicated to any desired particular business process like, for example, a flight reservation system.
For the sake of clarity of the present invention the term ‘backend system’ has a very general meaning. It is understood to comprise any kind of hardware/software combination operated in order to provide or contribute to realizing the business process intended by the mobile device user, and which is not directly concerned with the pure communication of data between the client and the enterprise.
Data are communicated from the PD to the enterprise along an ‘online’ connection via a particular Proxy Server. In order for the incoming data to be able to be processed by a servlet, i.e., a server-associated application, of the backend system it is processed by a so-called ‘content adaptation engine’ often located close to or integrated into the backend system. Other locations are of course possible and able to be integrated into the inventional concept disclosed later herein. Said engine is the actual communication partner for the PD and acts as a backend adapter. It usually has routing capabilities, supports a plurality of transfer protocols for in-and-out-traffic and transcodes the pure communication data into datasets which are adequately styled for being used in a database application, for example, which realizes the business process underlying the concerned PD-to-enterprise backend system communication.
Said prior art connections between the pervasive device and said backend system are very static and proprietary, and thus not flexible enough. The pervasive device has to connect to said Proxy server which must be previously configured at the device because the server is specific to the device. The Proxy server then connects to a statically configured server which in turn connects to the predefined backend system. Thus, each PD has to be assigned to a dedicated proxy server acting as a gateway for the application actually in use it.
As those Pervasive Devices become more and more important for the intended goal of ‘information retrieval at any time at any place’, it is necessary that these devices can connect to many different backend systems in a flexible way without knowing in advance which backend system will hold the user-required data whereby a minimum extent of customization work for the PD-user should be tolerated in view of an envisaged increased user comfort.
Further, it is neither possible to easily change between pervasive devices if they are not specifically set up for the connection to the backend system, nor is it possible to switch to a different backend system on the fly.